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Women's basketball: Lappe pleased with CU Buffs' consistency this season

Buffs won 25 games for first time since 1995-96 season

By Brian Howell Buffzone.com

Posted:
03/27/2013 06:29:07 PM MDT

Updated:
03/27/2013 06:31:13 PM MDT

Colorado women's coach Linda Lappe yells to her team during a game against Stanford on Jan. 4, at the Coors Event Center.
(
JEREMY PAPASSO
)

As of Wednesday, Colorado women's basketball coach Linda Lappe had yet to watch the game that ended her team's season.

She had, however, taken the time to reflect on an extremely successful season that saw the program take a few more steps in the right direction.

"I think we maximized a lot of opportunities that we had," said Lappe, who is 64-37 after three years as the Buffs' head coach. "I really think for the most part we reached our potential, which is something that you always want as you conclude a year.

"Obviously we're not happy with how it ended, but that's probably always going to be the case. Unless you win the national championship, you're going to always think you could have done a little bit better. That's what is going to help us as we go into next year. It gives you that itch to get back into it and start up again."

Colorado's best season in about a decade came to a sudden end on Saturday in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, when 12th-seeded Kansas upset the fifth-seeded and 19th-ranked Buffaloes in Boulder.

That loss aside, it was a banner season for the Buffs. Colorado finished the season with a 25-7 record, 13-5 in the Pac-12 Conference. It was the first time CU had reached 25 wins since 1995-96 (26-9) and the first time it had 13 conference wins since going 14-0 in 1994-95. CU also ended a nine-year NCAA Tournament drought.

"I am proud of our players and our staff and our support staff, just for what we were able to accomplish this year," Lappe said. "This year was unique in that everybody stepped up to the plate and everybody had a huge hand in winning 25 games."

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This was the fourth consecutive season that CU increased its win total, and the Buffs have made significant strides in the three years since Lappe took over. CU was 13-17 in 2009-10, before Lappe came aboard.

In 2010-11, Lappe led them to an 18-16 mark and a trip to the Women's NIT quarterfinals. Last year, they went 21-14 with another trip to the WNIT quarters.

This season, they cranked it up a few notches. The Buffs entered the national rankings in mid-December for the first time since early in the 2007-08 season. Once they got there, they remained in the rankings the rest of the season. It was their longest stay in the rankings since the 2003-04 season.

CU also beat a top-10 team -- then No. 8 Louisville on Dec. 14 -- for the first time since March 23, 2002. They competed well in other games against ranked teams.

"We learned how to win at a high level," Lappe said of the improvement her team made this season. "In the previous two years, we expected to win, which was a huge step, but this year, we not only expected to win, but we did whatever it took to win against good teams."

Lappe added that the ability of the players and staff to "value what they bring every single day" was a big step for the Buffs.

So was consistency. The Buffs were terribly inconsistent in Lappe's first two seasons, but changed that this year.

"That was a huge downfall in our previous two years," she said. "This year, not only were we consistent in our games; we were very consistent in practice. We never got too high, we never got too low. I really can count on one hand the number of bad practices we had."

It's also easy to count the number of bad games they had. There were really only two times all season that the Buffs just did not play well at all -- Feb. 1 at UCLA (a 62-46 loss) and Saturday against Kansas (a 67-52 loss).

As Lappe looks forward to next year -- and she's already started doing that -- she said the next step for CU is to learn how to beat the top-10 teams on a consistent basis, and to learn how to handle adversity against those teams.

"You've got to have confidence to beat a top-10 team, because they are going to have to confidence," Lappe said. "It's something I'd like to see us build to. The question is when and how."

Lappe the Buffs appear to be on their way to achieving that. They have recruited very good players so far and hope the Class of 2013, which will arrive in the summer, will make an impact, too.

Whether the Buffs can stay on the national radar remains to be seen, but there is some satisfaction in knowing that they are finally back on the radar.

"Being able to have everybody talk about Colorado women's basketball is always important," Lappe said. "The more that anybody can hear your name, the more they start paying attention to what you're doing."

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